Teaching English as a Foreign Language, Second Edition

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Nearly all advanced learners have been schooled in standard
and formal English: very few in the informal registers. This is
all very well in the classroom, in business or any other fairly
formal situation of everyday life. But it is less than useful in
talking to a native speaker at anything beyond the most
polite level, and in listening to native speakers talking to each
other. If the student is not aware of this already, it is worth
playing a tape (e.g. that accompanying Crystal and Davy’s
Advanced Conversational English) of Englishmen talking
naturally together to demonstrate how useless the book
English acquired over so many years of painful study really is
in actual practice. A major task of the teacher is to develop
an awareness of different styles of English. This awareness
must then lead to sensitivity to appropriate use in different
social situations.
The feeling for appropriacy can only be developed over a
considerable period. There is no short cut. Students should be
encouraged to question as words arise and to assign style
labels to them. The teacher also must ask where a new
expression might normally be found and how it is used. Apart
from developing in his students a general sensitivity to the
register of words, the teacher will have to spend a good deal of
time plugging the gaps in his students’ knowledge. This will
often mean, for instance, teaching colloquial English and
contrasting it with the standard or formal, which will be

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already known. One way to do this is to take a text with a high
incidence of colloquial lexis and structures (a play, or
transcript of a conversation) and read it through first for
general meaning. Then, by judicious questioning, the meaning
of the new vocabulary can be elicited from the class, and
explained where necessary. It is always useful to compare what
other modes of expression the author or speakers might have
used in a contrasting situation (an office, a school, a formal
reception, a lecture, a church) to put across the same meaning.
It is valuable then to give other contexts where the new lexis is
used, to build up in the learner’s mind its meaning and
associations. Practice is very important, so an exercise to
rewrite the passage being studied in more formal style and
writing natural dialogues using the new words are both useful
devices. A more difficult exercise is to attempt to rewrite a
formal passage in familiar and intimate style.
A sense of appropriacy is not of course restricted to
informal/formal language. There are many other varieties of
English which exhibit their own peculiar characteristics.
Newspapers, particularly the more popular ones, use a
distinctive variety of English of their own, ‘journalese’.
Sentences are short in length and not very complex in
structure, the vocabulary is concrete and direct. Quite the
opposite is the language of the Church and the Law, with its
antiquated flavour expressed by unusual words (oblation,
genuflection, tort, etc.) and complicated syntax. At the more
advanced levels, the student needs at very least an awareness
of these varieties and others. A basic book for the teacher is
D. Crystal and D.Davy’s Investigating English Style.